Amazon Wallet here to store your loyalty cards, not buy stuff

Amazon is keen to get us using their Fire Phone, and one of the latest apps released from Amazons hows why. The Amazon Wallet app, available on the Amazon App Store and Google Play, is a bit of a misnomer. While it can digitally store some things you might otherwise put in your wallet, it doesn’t keep the most important aspect close-by.

Amazon Wallet does what the recently updated Google Wallet app does in storing gift cards and rewards/loyalty cards. The clean interface makes finding your stuff easy enough, but the first sentence of this paragraph could be the last on Amazon Wallet. It stores card info. That’s it.

You can’t — at least currently — make a purchase using Amazon Wallet. Via the web version of Wallet, you can link your corresponding Amazon purchasing card, which suggests the online retailer is about to get into the mobile payment game. We can already “pay with Amazon” on sites that have that option enabled, but not int he real world.

The app as it sits is currently in beta, so we won’t judge it too harshly just yet. For what it is, though, beta is an appropriate tag. Storing loyalty cards is de rigueur for “wallet” apps like Google Wallet or Passbook, but neither of those are available on the Amazon App Store. Amazon Wallet is, and will come pre-loaded on the Fire Phone.